Edit: Nevermind that works perfectly. Forgot to add the .val back in.

I would never find that from the documentation online, javascript is such a strange language.

Thanks for the help!

You should also research JQuery functions when looking for things like this; a lot of the solutions posted here, including the one above, are using the JQuery libraries so you might not find as easy of a solution with vanilla JavaScript.

Will do thanks. It seems I need to understand DOM more than javascript. It's always accessing the controls within forms that seems to throw me off, never seems to match up with what others are recommending when discussing general web development.

The key difference in Forms is that the selectors we rely on tend to reference the parent containers rather than the elements themselves. In general web development threads you're typically dealing with sites that can be fully edited-customized, but in Forms we have a layer of overhead to consider.

For example, when I add a custom class to a field called "testClass" and reference that using $('.testClass') I am actually getting the div around the input (although it seems complicated, I think this is actually a good design because we can use CSS to customize labels too and not just the fields/inputs).

A good way to look might be that most examples you find online are navigating a DOM that contains a bunch of houses with their own address; they use the ID attribute or class assigned directly to an input, select, etc.

However, in Forms, it is more like navigating a neighborhood of apartment buildings; after we find the right address, we still need to provide the equivalent of a unit number to get where we want to be.

Think "123 Main Street, Apartment 101"

So, I use $('.testClass input') or $('.testClass select') instead of just the class because it gets me to the right container and grabs the desired DOM element.

Hey that's helpful. I always thought it was silly to reference the type each time you reference the variable. Coming from a C# background, I reference the type on declaration, not every time I call the thing. That explains why.

The most common javascript requests are not that complex, they just need to run some calculations or verification on some fields. Writing the code is simple, but the crazy amount of methods and ways to access the field values really slows things down.

I would like to write a library that allowed something like this. Where "$$" finds the field, gets the type, and returns/sets the value. This would make is easier to do basic functions quick and even train other semi-programmers who are not familiar with the DOM layer.

$$myTotalFieldClass = $$someFieldClass + $$someOtherFieldClass

var iNeedThisValue = $$theClassOfTheValueINeed

I did figure out how to write a really cool function that returns a table and all it's values in a single variable. This has been super helpful, no more foreach loops just to get or total values.

var myTable = GetTableValues('tableClass', 'column1Class', 'column2Class', 'etc');

After running this one line, you can access each column as an array with myTable.columnClassName

No need to specify types either.